


Hurricane in a Bottle

by mllelaurel



Category: No. 6 (Anime & Manga), No. 6 - All Media Types, No. 6 - Asano Atsuko
Genre: Bittersweet, Bondage, M/M, Masochism, Reunion, Shion's Brain Is A Very Special Place
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-12
Updated: 2016-05-12
Packaged: 2018-06-08 01:03:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6832510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mllelaurel/pseuds/mllelaurel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If they were normal people coming together for the first time, this would all be too much too fast. But there’s nothing normal about them. Not the things things they’ve faced together; nor who they’ve always been, before the world ever touched them. The deepest core of Shion’s heart has always been a hurricane trapped under glass, the howl of the wind drowning out reason and rationality.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hurricane in a Bottle

“Did you dream of me while I was gone?” Nezumi’s lips brush the rim of Shion’s ear. His breath ruffles the fine hairs at the nape of Shion’s neck, and Shion, who’s never forgotten a dream in his life, finds himself struggling to remember _words_. Spoken in the right order, surely they would form sentences. It’s inevitable. But the knack for it has gone and left Shion’s brain. 

How do you tell someone that the sky in your dreams is always silvery-gray? That you dream of them in the crack of thunder and the icy sting of rain on your face; the adrenaline-prickle of a knife set against your throat, and the disconcertingly realistic smell of blood clogging your nostrils. That those dreams always leave you hard, blood pounding in your temples like gunfire, and you wake up ready to scream; ready to break something, or maybe just _break_. 

Shion swallows. “Yes? No? I…”

“It was a simple question. Try to keep up, Your Majesty.” 

Snorting in reply wouldn’t be very polite. If only years of Reconstruction Committee meetings haven’t done a depressingly good job of honing Shion’s politeness in critical moments and wearing it away to shreds the rest of the time. It’s a shame, really. “As if anything about you is ever simple.” 

“And that-” Shion can feel Nezumi’s mouth curve into a smile, “-is just how I like it.” His teeth close over Shion’s earlobe and bite down.

“Sh-sharp!” The word doesn’t even begin to describe it. It hurts, but not enough to be a problem. Instead, the pain zings through Shion like a live wire. 

He doesn’t usually pay his body any more attention than he has to. That is… he’s perfectly capable of savoring the sweetness of a cherry cake; of feeling grit settling on his skin after a long day; of knowing when he’s injured, whether it’s a stubbed toe or a bullet wound. The rest of the time, he just sets it aside, unimportant compared to the practical clockwork of his mind or the familiar ache in his heart. (He tries to ignore that, too. He’s just not very good at it.) 

But now, he feels like he’s coming alive all over again. The weight of Nezumi’s arm around his waist. The heat of his mouth. Long, dark hair come loose from its ponytail, tickling Shion’s collarbone. The sheer _gravity_ of someone else in his space, half proprioception, half destiny. The familiar-unfamiliar scent of road dust, leather and steel. All that and more, filling up Shion’s senses. The light knocking of the wind against his shutters. The aftertaste of the red wine he’d had with dinner. Shaggy carpet under his toes. It comes at him, bowling him over like a windstorm, a flood, and he feels his own heart beating loud enough to drown out the world. 

“Wow,” Nezumi laughs. “You really like that.” 

Shion’s face flushes. “Of course I like it! Otherwise, I would have stopped you already.” 

Nezumi’s hand clenches in the hem of Shion’s shirt. Travels upward, as though he’s counting the buttons, one at a time. “Could you, really?” Elegant, familiar fingers curl around Shion’s neck, thumb pressing down over his windpipe, hard enough to make him notice; enough to make him struggle against the pressure, sucking in gulps of air just because he can. “Would you be capable of stopping me if you really tried?”

Shion has to pause and think about that for a second, evaluating his position. “Yes, I believe so. An elbow in your gut, then I would slam the top of my head into your jaw. There - that’s one advantage of being shorter than you, isn’t it?” He grins, a little shaky. “Just like you taught me. Or I could follow my own instincts and _ask_. That’s a thing people do, you know.”

He doesn’t expect the tremor in Nezumi’s arm, the full-body shudder that goes through him, unmissable at this range. His eyes are dark, when Shion turns around to peer into them, half-lidded and oh-so-easy to get lost in. Shion’s tongue itches with the ‘are you alright? Is this? Are we?’ ready to ruin whatever mood this is. Then, Nezumi brushes his lips over Shion’s temple, and the train of thought derails as Shion _melts_. 

“Good.” Barely above a whisper, voice catching in a way that really shouldn’t be seductive but _is_. It’s because Nezumi isn’t trying, Shion realizes. Whatever this is, it’s genuine. 

...Or at least it is until Nezumi pitches his voice just an octave deeper. “Good boy.” 

Shion barely stifles a growl of irritation, only half succeeding. “Don’t patronize me.” 

“But isn’t it appropriate, when you’re starting to sound like one of Inukashi’s dogs?”

“Do you _want_ me to bite you?” Shion knows he’s walking into this one, and he doesn’t care. 

“That depends.” Nezumi strokes Shion’s hair with a startling tenderness. He never could leave it well enough alone, since it turned white. His tastes are clearly warped. Not that Shion can talk. “What do you want, Shion?”

The answer’s obvious. “Kiss me again.” 

“Oh?” Nezumi teases. “Haven’t we done enough of that already?” It’s like telling a man who’d been slowly dying of thirst in the desert that a cupful of water should suffice. It makes a difference, to be sure, and he’d be far worse off without it, but the very idea that he could ever kiss Nezumi _enough_ is preposterous. 

***

Their third kiss is broken glass and snapshots in Shion’s mind, lips half-numb with terror-joy-disbelief, eyes wide and blurry, hands clutching at Nezumi’s frayed jacket. Still the same jacket, after all this time; the same superfiber scarf, coming loose in Shion’s grip. It doesn’t feel real until Nezumi pulls away, laughing and chiding Shion for his sloppy technique. Only then does Shion feel a trace of warmth seeping back into his body, or realize there’s tears streaking down his face, to the cheeping chorus of worried mice. 

Their fourth is better, and the ones that follow it better still. 

***

“Kiss me again,” Shion insists, and Nezumi does, radiating heat and life wherever their bodies touch, open-mouthed and eager, so there’s no need for Shion to question whether or not he wants this as much as Shion does. Nezumi’s jacket lies discarded somewhere in the living room, shirt untucked, practically asking Shion to dip his hands underneath. If Nezumi were ticklish, he’d be dead by now, but he’s not, so _that’s_ all right. 

Nezumi catches his hand, before he can get too far. “I see you’ve gotten more confident.”

“I… have?” Shion’s not sure he has. “I know I want you. That’s all.”

“That’s _all_ , huh? You don’t ask for a lot, do you?”

“Is it a lot?” This is why he’s out of his depths, Shion thinks. This cold-water, suddenly uncertain feeling. “It’s not… I mean, if you don’t…”

Nezumi brings the captured hand up to his lips, kissing Shion’s knuckles, gallant as any storybook knight. “Does this feel like something I dislike?” he asks. His tongue flicks between Shion’s ring and pointer fingers. “Does _this_?” Without warning, his teeth sink into the meat of Shion’s palm, right below his thumb. “How about this, Shion?”

The noise Shion makes sounds alien to his ears, husky and desperate. His head swims, sound pouring in and out of his ears like honey. “Please.”

“Please what, Shion?”

“Make love to me.” Shion wants to close his eyes. Wants to bury his face in Nezumi’s neck and breathe in his scent, but he knows this is something he needs to say with his eyes wide open. And maybe that’s just a metaphor, but the literal side of it has value as well. 

Nezumi sighs, noisy and frustrated. “You had to pick the tritest way of putting it, didn’t you?”

“Would you rather I strive for the biologically improbable and suggest the two of us become one?” Shion bites off a sigh of his own. 

Nezumi rolls his eyes. “I could still leave, you know.” 

_Don’t you dare._ Shion hears cloth tearing, and realizes he’s got Nezumi’s shirt in a dead man’s grip. “I’d rather be honest than original,” he says. “I love you, and that inevitably colors the meaning of what we do here.” _Whether you like it or not._ There are other ways of putting it, of course. Vulgar ways, and colloquial ones, and even the fallback of biology learned from No. 6’s textbooks. None of them communicate his intent, and what is language for if not communication? 

***

One thing he’s never told Nezumi is some nights he dreams of Safu as well. She reaches out to him, in those dreams, and he realizes he’s forgotten the shape of her hands, or the look in her eyes without Eylurias’s eerie light haunting the depths. Her body crumbles to pixels, and his hands slip through her as if she’s a ghost. As if she’s just a figment of his imagination; a lonely misfire of neurons inside his brain. 

The real answer is C, of course: All of the Above. She’s dead, and this is a dream. _”I’m a manifestation of your guilt,”_ he can sometimes hear her say. _”Really, Shion. It’s just a matter of simple psychology.”_ So achingly _close_ to the way she would sound in real life, even if he knows that No.6’s curriculum would never have covered dream symbology, guilt or grief. Nezumi’s the one who taught him about those, and no one had ever taught Safu at all; not unless it was a part of her study abroad program. He’ll never know for sure, now. 

This is his punishment, Shion thinks, for failing to want her the way he should have. His suspicion that he might have saved her, if only he’d loved her enough, if his heart didn’t already belong to someone else. 

_”Idiot,”_ she whispers, or maybe that’s Nezumi’s voice after all. _”Love doesn’t work like that.”_

Shion wakes up with the sheets wadded up around him, and for a moment, still half asleep, he thinks he’s clutching a long-outgrown handmade sweater. 

***

Even saying ‘I love you’ is a risk. He’s zero for two, as far as Nezumi’s past reactions are concerned. Shion waits for him to protest, but Nezumi’s eyes are closed, mouth set in a funny sort of line, and he doesn’t say anything at all. The moment is Shion’s to steal, and that’s what he does, kissing Nezumi again - and again and again - until Nezumi’s arms slide around his waist, pulling him closer. Nezumi’s lips are shockingly soft. How could Shion have failed to notice that, before? He would have expected the road to take its toll in windburn, at least. Or is it that human beings are always this soft, when their walls come down? 

For someone as theatrical as he is, Nezumi doesn’t make a lot of noise. A stifled gasp against Shion’s mouth; a breath gone ragged. He lets his hands do the talking instead, fingers digging into Shion’s thighs; making short work of the buttons on Shion’s shirt, his belt, the zipper of his trousers. 

Shion doesn’t expect the prickle of cold air on his skin to catch him off-guard. For the scrape of fingernails down his spine to leave him shivering hard, tiny hairs rising on the back of his neck. He doesn’t expect to forget how to reciprocate, hands caught in Nezumi’s shirt, not quite managing to pull it over his head. 

“Don’t tell me you’re getting cold feet.” Despite the words, there’s no challenge in Nezumi’s voice. Just a moment suspended, waiting, and Shion’s the only one who’s challenging himself here. _How foolish. Did you think taking off your clothes wouldn’t leave you feeling naked?_

But Nezumi’s not the only one here who’s capable of being stubborn. Shion forces himself to breathe past the lead balloon inside his chest. “It’s nothing like that.” 

The beat of Nezumi’s pulse is thready, irregular, when Shion lowers his mouth to the hinge of Nezumi’s jaw, and it quickens when Shion’s teeth graze the open column of Nezumi’s throat, when he finds the source of that drumbeat and sucks. The heady scent of warmth and sweat and arousal fills Shion’s lungs, and it’s better than air; better than thought. And better still, the feeling of Nezumi’s laughter bubbling up in his chest, close enough to touch. 

“I see. So you’ve become a vampire while I was away.” 

“Mmm. That must be it.” Shion fights to keep a straight face. “‘I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul.’” 

Nezumi tips his chin, looks him square in the eye. “Yeah, but that’s just how you’ve always been.”

“Even before I met you.” 

If they were normal people coming together for the first time, this would all be too much too fast. But there’s nothing normal about them. Not the things things they’ve faced together; nor who they’ve always been, before the world ever touched them. The deepest core of Shion’s heart has always been a hurricane trapped under glass, the howl of the wind drowning out reason and rationality. 

Nezumi looks away. “That’s the part I have a hard time believing.” He keeps his expression hidden as he gets rid of his shirt, pulling the cloth up as a barrier between him and Shion, then tossing it aside. 

“It’s true.” There’s a mark on Nezumi’s neck now, purpling and tender. _That’s mine,_ Shion thinks. 

“Proud of your handiwork?” Nezumi closes the distance between them again, right as Shion starts wondering what might happen if he were to poke that little bruise. What sort of expression would Nezumi make? Would it be one of pain, or pleasure, or something else altogether: one of those inscrutable Nezumi faces not even Nezumi himself seems to reliably decypher? He doesn’t get the chance to find out, as Nezumi pushes the button-down off his shoulders, and Shion finds his arms trapped behind his back. It’s only for a few seconds, before he frees himself from the tangle, but still long enough for Shion’s stomach to twist with an alien thrill. 

“Huh? I guess so…” Hadn’t Nezumi just asked him something? Some sort of response must be due, and the expression on Nezumi’s face is oddly thoughtful, if not a little evil. 

“Classic Shion.” Nezumi smirks. He really has a beautiful mouth. Wonderfully expressive, just like the rest of him. “Hey, you still with me?”

“Of course!”

“With an airhead like you, it pays to check.” Nezumi rests his face in Shion’s hair, almost nuzzling it, and starts easing Shion’s trousers off his hips. By accident or by design, his underwear comes along for the ride as well, but this time Shion feels no discomfort, only anticipation. 

“What about you?” he asks. 

“What _about_ me?” Nezumi’s fingers dance along his thighs, teasing. “Step out of those before you trip.” 

Kicking his pants aside is almost an afterthought. Nezumi’s right - he probably would have tripped. They’re not exactly foremost on his mind. “You’re still…” Only half undressed, and compared to Shion’s state, that’s just unfair. 

He’s seen Nezumi shirtless before, countless times, but the palpable _difference_ of this still feels like a luxury. Shion runs his hands over warm skin, careful around the scars - _there are so many_ , he thinks with a pang - and splays his fingers over Nezumi’s heartbeat. 

“We’re still here,” Nezumi says, quiet. Shion’s chest aches, and he has to close his eyes before the bittersweet feeling overwhelms him. 

When he opens them again, he finds Nezumi crouched down on the floor, looking for something. “Hey, Shion? How sturdy is that belt of yours?”

“My belt?” Shion fumbles a little at the non sequitur. “Uh… My old one fell apart maybe a year ago, and I had it replaced.” 

“That should do it.” Nezumi picks up said belt, back on his feet in a single fluid motion, and the air in the room turns charged, thundercrack-electric. 

Shion’s muscles tense before he sees Nezumi spring into action. There’s time enough for him to react, but he chooses not to, letting himself get shoved up against his own writing desk, his arms twisted behind his back. His shoulders shake with tension and nervous laughter. 

“Oh? You think this is funny?”

He _must_ , as more laughter gushes forth in reply. “You- you startled me!”

Nezumi’s hand flattens out against the back of Shion’s neck, pushing him facedown into the desk’s surface. It’s oddly soothing, half-massage and half-threat. “I’ll do more than startle you, if you don’t…”

“It must be adrenaline,” Shion theorizes. 

“Must it?” Shion can practically hear Nezumi’s eyebrow arch. He _does_ hear the crinkle of leather, as Nezumi starts to loop the belt around his wrists. “This is the sort of thing you like, isn’t it?”

Shion would argue, but he’s never been any good at lying. Especially now, with Nezumi’s weight pinning him down, and Nezumi’s mouth hot on his throat. 

“Answer me.”

Shion shifts under him. “Is it strange that I do?”

“‘Tis strange,’” Nezumi declaims, “‘but true; for truth is always strange. Stranger than fiction: if it could be told, how much would novels gain by the exchange! How differently the world would men behold!’ ...Actually,” he adds with a scoff, “as depravity goes, this is pretty tame.” 

Would he still say that, Shion wonders, if he knew the way Shion sometimes recalls the point of a knife at his throat, and the way his groin throbs with heat in response?

“So, what’ll it be, Shion?” Nezumi runs a fingertip over the length of Shion’s erection. Curls his hand around it at the root. “Would you like me to tie you up and fuck you?”

Shion could point out that they’re halfway there already, and he hasn’t exactly been protesting every step of the way. Instead, he smiles and says, “Yes, I would like that. Very much.”

“Good.” Nezumi’s cheek is fever-hot against Shion’s shoulder. “There’d be no point if you didn’t enjoy it. I…” Nezumi cuts himself off, and Shion hears the tinny buzz of a zipper; a shuffle of cloth. Out the corner of his eye, he catches sight of two small items in Nezumi’s hand. A condom, and a packet of what must be some kind of lubricant. Whether Nezumi’s preparedness speaks more to his everyday life or his expectations for this reunion, Shion doesn’t know enough to say. Either one would fit; either one would tell its own story. 

“Spread your legs a little more for me. Yeah, just like that.” Two sentences; enough to remind Shion just how exposed he is in this position, as he widens his stance. Behind his back, Shion’s hands flex, nails digging into his palms. 

Nezumi’s mouth trails an invisible line across Shion’s back, and Shion _knows_ he’s following the winding snake of his scar, like a river tributary to the sea, though it’s never been sensitive, or even numb, in the way of normal scars. Just everyday nerves under normal skin, indelibly marked by the numinous world. 

“N-nezumi…”

“Yeah?” Nezumi’s fingers slip between his legs, a hint of slickness and pressure. 

“Nothing.” The wood is cool under his cheek. “I just like saying your name.” 

“You don’t even know my name.” 

“Don’t I?” He’s been Nezumi for so long. It’s the name swirling through Shion’s dreams; cycling through his mind when he falls asleep. The name Shion calls when the joy inside his chest grows too expansive to contain, or when despair tightens its vice around his heart. “What’s in a name-?”

“Overused, to the point where it’s lost all meaning. I don’t want to hear it.” A finger presses inside him, none-too-gently, and Shion cries out. “Much better. Still common, but this one’s got a certain universal quality, don’t you think?”

“So…” Shion bites his lip. “You just don’t want me calling you a rat in bed. Is that it?”

“What bed?” 

“I sleep at my desk sometimes!” More nights than he’d care to discuss, actually. It’s not the healthiest of his cultivated habits. 

Nezumi adds another finger, and Shion arches his back against the slight burn. It really is a strange sensation. Not exactly painful, but _tense_ , and far too slippery. 

“I am a rat, though,” Nezumi says. “I get into your food stores and eat my fill. I spread pestilence wherever I go, and I’ll always disappear before the ship has sunk.” It’s disconcerting, the way he makes this, too, sound sensual, intimate in its broken sort of way. 

“That hasn’t been my experience,” Shion insists, quiet. “I’ve found rats to be intelligent, curious. Unhappy when denied companionship of their kind.” 

“That’s the domesticated variety.” 

A ruthless twist of Nezumi’s fingers sets off sparks behind Shion’s eyelids. At the same time, his other hand curls into Shion’s hair and _pulls_ , and everything’s hot and bright. Shion’s vision floats and focuses at once, sharp as a laser. “Please…” He doesn’t even know what he’s begging for. Anything. _Everything._

“Not yet.” Nezumi takes him in hand again, keeping his strokes loose and leisurely. Just enough to make Shion ache with need instead of relieving it. 

“Not-? What? _Why_?”

“Because you’re still-” Nezumi sucks in a shaky breath. “Because you ask too many questions.” 

Shion wishes he could see the expression on his face right now. What would Nezumi look like, flushed with arousal and overwhelmed? Would he fight it, only giving himself away in the sensuous curve of his mouth? Would he keep his eyes hooded, half-hidden beneath their lashes, or wide and defiant, pupils blown and dark? What does his penis look like? What would it feel like, as it thickens in Shion’s hands, or-?

Shion pushes against those questing fingers, savoring the stretch, the thrill of intrusion. “Next time, I’d like to have you in my mouth, okay?”

“Already planning for the next time?” Nezumi sounds unimpressed - or possibly thrown off-balance. “Fine, okay. Looks like you’re…” His fingers pull away, and Shion chokes down a whimper. 

“Relax,” Nezumi says, and there’s a heavier, blunter pressure, relentless and almost more than Shion can bear. “For fuck’s sake… Oh, fuck, Shion…” And that’s Nezumi’s voice catching on a moan. Nezumi’s voice stuttering over Shion’s name, over and over again. Nezumi’s hand, clenched around his bicep, hard enough to leave bruises. The inexorable stretch of Nezumi moving slowly inside him. Every slide and jolt turns Shion’s breath into sobs, sound tearing its way out of his chest, and he’s hollowed out, nothing extraneous left inside him. Nothing but love, heavy as a winter blanket around his shoulders; the awkward, perfect rhythm of their bodies; and a flare of heat, surging through him, boiling in his blood, screaming at him to move, move, move, and he _can’t_. Without the lever age of his arms, Shion is helpless, completely at Nezumi’s mercy. 

As if to prove it, Nezumi grabs the belt around Shion’s wrists, using it to yank Shion closer, their hips flush, his forehead resting between Shion’s shoulderblades. Shion can feel his lips moving, silently forming unknown words against Shion’s skin; the heavy humidity of his breath. With every roll of Nezumi’s hips, Shion can feel something unravel inside him, maddening; too close and just out of reach. 

Another yank, and the belt comes loose, metal buckle clanging as it hits the floor. Shion’s arms throb as blood rushes back into them, leaving them cottony and stiff. He grasps blindly for Nezumi’s hand, and Nezumi lets him, fingers going slack and clammy for only the briefest second before he squeezes back, holding on to Shion for dear life. 

There’s no holding back now. Shion’s arm trembles under his weight as he pushes back into Nezumi’s thrusts. Those thrusts are coming faster now, hitting deeper. Shion feels his voice unhitch, shouting into the void, dimly sorry for his neighbors downstairs. 

It’s already too much, even before Nezumi guides their joined hands to Shion’s erection, and the rest is free fall, like someone’s tipped the floor beneath Shion’s feet, the sharp edge of climax coming up to greet him. 

Reality reasserts itself with Shion’s elbow giving way at last, leaving him to faceplant nose-first into his own wrist. It doesn’t hurt, but he finds himself saying ‘ow,’ anyway, more out of surprise than anything else. 

“You alive over there?” Nezumi sounds out of breath. It’s sexy, and it makes Shion feel protective of him at the same time. He mumbles something in reply, barely paying attention to his own words. “Right. I’ll take that as a ‘no.’” 

Shion is still gripping Nezumi’s hand, vice-like, and his fingers tighten when Nezumi withdraws from him, with a muffled, almost plaintive “fuck.” Letting go takes conscious, deliberate action, fueled by the suspicion that he’s probably hurting Nezumi at this point. After that, it’s just a matter of letting himself fold under; letting Nezumi tug him sprawling onto the floor. 

“Was that okay?” Shion asks. 

Nezumi rakes an exasperated hand through his hair. “Only you would let someone fuck you stupid, then ask if _they_ had a good time of it.”

Shion curls up close to him. “I’d say ‘let’ is a rather mild way of putting it.” 

“Still”. Nezumi stares up at the ceiling, eyes following a nonexistent crack. “You’re going to be sore, after all of that.” 

“Mmm, probably.” Shion feels raw and relaxed, fuzzy around the edges. If anything, he’s looking forward to the very physical, very _real_ imprint of soreness. 

“This is a mess,” Nezumi declares, arm slung over his face, like a sleeper trying to block out the lamplight. A calculatedly casual pose, gone brittle in execution, shoulders just a trifle too hunched; arm muscles a fraction too rigid. 

“It shouldn’t be too difficult to clean up,” Shion replies, though Nezumi’s almost certainly referring to more than just an overturned chair, a scattering of clothes, or the stickiness of their bodies, and Nezumi can’t resist dropping the arm just to glare at him. His eyes are very wide and very bright, when Shion leans in to kiss him, squeezing shut when Shion’s lips brush over his forehead. 

_I could break him like this,_ Shion thinks. _I don’t want to, but I could._

With a groan, Nezumi heaves himself to his feet, then grabs Shion’s wrist and pulls, till Shion has no choice but to join him. “Please tell me your apartment comes with a bath.”

“It comes with a shower?” It comes with running water. That’s all that matters. 

“What luxury our good Sir Committee Member lives in,” says the man used to a library vault, underground. 

“I like it here,” Shion says. It’s only half a lie, which is almost like telling the truth. 

Nezumi’s eyes drill right down to the core of him. “Do you, really?” And it’s Shion’s loss. This man knows him too well. 

He looks away and says, “It was empty without you.”

***

They bury another of Inukashi’s dogs in the heat of that first empty summer. The earth is crumbly and dry under Shion’s shovel, spring rains long-reduced to a memory. Shion’s grown used to digging graves by now. Lots of practice, in the months after the city’s fall, calluses replacing the blisters on his hands. 

Karan helps Inukashi wrap the old terrier in sackcloth. They lay him in the ground to the boom and clang of construction crews tearing down an old, condemned building several blocks away. 

Shion’s a terrible singer, with a limited repertoire, but it’s better than nothing. The gods won’t appreciate him borrowing their sacred hymns, and Nezumi, wherever he is, would appreciate it even less. So Shion makes do:

“The poor soul sat sighing  
By a sycamore tree  
Sing all a green willow  
Her hand on her bosom,  
Her head on her knee  
Sing willow, willow, willow…”

And it’s funny, that this is all he can think of. A man’s voice cracking over the final anthem of a woman getting ready to die at the hands of the man she loves, as she recalls another woman’s heartbreak. Shion, who has always believed in love, sings thesis and testament to all the ways in which love won’t save you. 

***

The warm water makes a curtain between them, sluicing down Shion’s back and plastering Nezumi’s hair over his face. They move in silent, unpracticed accord, bumping into one another companionably, filling the room with steam and the lemony scent of cheap shampoo. 

“Will you stay?” Shion asks, as he’s turning off the shower. 

Nezumi swipes a towel from the rack. “Who knows?”

“Will you stay tonight?”

“I might as well.” There’s a long silence. Shion turns to open the door. “I missed you,” Nezumi says. 

Shion holds out his arms. All Nezumi has to do is step forward, and the rest is gravity.

**Author's Note:**

> All right, time to source some quotes:
> 
> “I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul.” - _Dracula_ , by Bram Stoker. 
> 
> “Tis strange,-but true; for truth is always strange;  
> Stranger than fiction: if it could be told,  
> How much would novels gain by the exchange!  
> How differently the world would men behold!” - _Don Juan_ , by Lord Byron. 
> 
> "What's in a name?" etc., etc. - William Shakespeare's _Romeo and Juliet_ of course. 
> 
> “The poor soul sat sighing  
> By a sycamore tree  
> Sing all a green willow  
> Her hand on her bosom,  
> Her head on her knee  
> Sing willow, willow, willow…” - Desdemona's lament, from _Othello_ , also by Shakespeare. 
> 
> In lighter author's note news, I love Shion's voice, but next time I write porn, I will pick a narrator who will damn well say 'dick,' when I want him too.


End file.
